Saturday, December 15, 2012

Sources tell ABC News that President Obama has decided that he will nominate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to be secretary of state.

For a variety of reasons including the finalization of the process,
other pending Cabinet decisions, and — more immediately — the national
reaction to the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the
news will not be announced in the next few days.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is recovering from an illness
and a concussion she suffered upon fainting because of that illness, is
set to retire in the next few weeks.

We'll see where this goes. Republicans have to be incredibly careful not to look like insensitive assho...wait a minute, Republicans will attack Kerry anyhow.

The Obama administration said Friday that more than half the states had rejected its pleas to set up their own health insurance
exchanges, dealing a setback to President Obama’s hopes that
Republicans would join a White House campaign to provide health
insurance to all Americans.

Friday was the deadline for states to notify the federal government of
their plans, and administration officials had been hoping that Mr.
Obama’s re-election would overcome resistance to the new health care law.

Federal officials said they knew of 17 states that intended to run their own exchanges, as Congress intended.

Instead, the President's re-election just pissed off the rest of the GOP. Republican governor after Republican governor (and more than a few Democrats, like Missouri's Jay Nixon) refused to participate, and Idaho GOP Gov. Butch Otter actually had his state joined the exchange because he hates the plan, wants the law completely repealed, and the last thing he wanted was the Feds coming in to set up the exchange for him by God.

So in the new year, HHS has 33 exchanges to set up. Ironically, here in Kentucky, Gov. Dinosaur Steve was perfectly happy with the idea that we expand Medicaid and set up exchanges, because nobody's going to buy the excuse that Kentucky's poor aren't mostly all white people who get a crapload of government assistance anyway.

A heavily armed
gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children from 5 to 10 years old,
in a rampage at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday, one of the
worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

The gunman - who according to a
media report carried four weapons and wore a bulletproof vest - was
dead inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, state
police Lieutenant Paul Vance told a news conference.

Vance
said authorities found 18 children and seven adults, including the
gunman, dead at the school, and two children were pronounced dead later
after being take to a hospital. Another adult was found dead at a
related crime scene in Newtown, he said, bringing the toll to 28.

For what it’s worth, I’d like to see a comprehensive federal gun control statute that encompasses all those principles, too, although the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, popularly referred to as the “Brady Bill,” contains some of those provisions.

But, of course, as my fellow liberals should know (and if you don’t know … why don’t you know?!), the Supreme Court has made that difficult to accomplish. In two recent cases – District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290 (June 26, 2008), and McDonald v. City of Chicago, No. 08-1521 (June 28, 2010) – Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution creates an individual right to keep and bear arms, which, although not unlimited, prevents both the federal government (Heller), and state and municipal governments (McDonald), from imposing the most direct (and perhaps draconian) form of gun control: Outright bans on handgun ownership.

Indeed, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down earlier this month Oak Park, Illinois' anti concealed carry gun control law as a direct violation of the precedent set by Heller.

“The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside,” Judge Richard Posner wrote in the court’s majority opinion. “The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense.”

So, given that the Executive cannot simply mandate gun control, the Legislative will not pass gun control, and the Judicial has said gun control violates the Second Amendment, exactly what should Obama do to magically fix this problem?

I'm all ears. If you want to stop guns, go after the manufacturers and the lobbyists. Period. Guns are a product, sold in the US. They have arguably the most powerful product lobby on Earth. You're going to need to start with them.

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With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and the Trump Regime now in charge of the Executive, there's still a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.

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